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Talk:A Time for War, A Time for Peace
I hate to put a damper on an enthusiastic contributor... but this "summary" seems to be turning into a novel in its own right. It would be better, I think, to break up thsi great detail and dole it out into the individual articles on the characters, etc. involved. Just my two cents. --Seventy 03:43, 22 April 2007 (UTC) Yes, I agree the summary really getting up there (I am writing it) and there are still 5 chapters of the book left. As was discussed on a forum page Forum:Novel pages I had intended to really make a good page for a novel that was really "complete" (also notice the crazy list of characters and references). Help and suggestions are greatly appreciated. One of the two featured articles that are novels is which also has a very long summary so I didn't think this was obviously too long. I know that summaries are things that I would really like to see a lot more of on other pages (for stories I haven't read) but certainly only details that are fairly essential to the overall story need to be included which means I could cut this a lot. Of course I still haven't finished the whole thing, but hopefully I will soon and I will work on pairing it down as well (please feel free to get started for me.) --Jdvelasc 04:27, 22 April 2007 (UTC) :I was actually surprised by the fact that novelization was a featured article. It seems very well-written, but to me, after a certain point, you might as well just read the book. I agree with Seventy in that it is best to have the detail in the related pages, rather than the novel. There really are a lot of references for this, too! Nothing really to be done about that; I think it's good to have a complete list of related articles. :I think two things that would help a lot are (a) pare down the summary, and (b) change the reference list format to eliminate all the white space. Your approach to this seems very complete, which is good, but the current result is a very bulky article which, as a reader, I am not remotely inclined to sift through. Keep in mind that 32kb is the suggested max size for an article; this page is at that right now. :I will try helping out with this if I think of a way. -- Data Noh 05:27, 22 April 2007 (UTC) ::The white space in the appearances section was my attempt to match up the two columns. On the left are characters, ships, etc. that were actually in the novel, on the right references only. If I simply deleted the blank lines from the edit page, the references side stays just as long so the total white space doesn't get smaller at all. Another option is to have the "referenced only" stuff start on the left and then wrap around to the right. That seems pretty weird to me. By the way - does anyone know a better way of forming these columns? I can't get them to line up - there must be a two columns auto thingy. --Jdvelasc 05:34, 22 April 2007 (UTC) Good job tidying up the references Mike, much neater way to do things. I agree with the above that the summary could probably do with being a bit more summarised. I think the Siege is an oddity, look at other featured articles with summaries and they are much more to the point. -- 8of5 12:49, 22 April 2007 (UTC) :Hmm, the only other featured article of this type is History Lesson, could have sworn got through at some point... --8of5 12:53, 22 April 2007 (UTC) :I either never noticed or ignored it, but yeah, that needs some serious compression and reorganization. (Maybe after I wrap up the rest of Mere Anarchy) --Seventy 15:00, 22 April 2007 (UTC) :Yes, thanks Mike. I know it takes a lot of work to format something this long. I must say that I like the look of the vertical list better, but for this page there are just too many lines for that. I don't think it could look any better without losing content. With the list, it is also possible to have notes about the characters (such as their occupation or rank) which is helpful for minor positions (see Articles of the Federation (novel) though again I wonder what others think about deleting those things. But no matter the answer, way too unwieldy for this page. At any rate, I have finished summarizing the book and cut significant portions of it. Please feel free to improve the summary if you can. My question now is whether this page is perfect as is. I know we need to turn a lot of the links blue and fill in a lot of details on other pages, but is THIS page the way it should look? --Jdvelasc 00:42, 26 April 2007 (UTC) ::Not quite, the information and related stories sections (which you removed) are blank, I don't know what general information there might be for this but there are defiantly related stories, Nemesis, the rest of A Time To..., Titan, all sorts of episodes no doubt, I could list those generally but as you've read it recently I think you'd be more qualified to go into specifics. ::Another thing I tried on and think would be a good feature to expand would be the "Character arc development" section, lists what happens in the lives of the regular characters, how this story moves them on from and too connecting novels, not suitable for all novels, but something like this in a miniseries and leading into Nemesis and beyond is perfect for it. Though of course that’s not a standard page feature so if you don’t fancy it no biggy.--8of5 00:51, 26 April 2007 (UTC) ::On list styles, I agree I prefer the verticle ones gernerally, but in this case there was just to much. However I only really prefer because i find it nicer to read and look at, I dont think listing character details in that cloumn is wise, the Articles of the Federation page is insane! -- 8of5 01:03, 26 April 2007 (UTC) As mentioned earlier on this page, the summary for this book is long. I tried to fix this by putting in chapter breaks, and then realized that a lot of the information is presented in a way that breaks the original narrative flow of the piece (see the convoluted table of contents). Is there a reason for that, and if so, is there another way to divide the summary? -- Data Noh 15:54, 3 May 2007 (UTC) :I'm struggling to word this so I do apologise if I ramble; If the chapters are as distinct as the new divisions make them then it's odd they are in the wrong order, and reading through it's detailed enough to indicate chapters haven’t been merged together for the sake of summarising so why put them out of order? And then my second thought, I don’t think dividing by chapter is a good idea, it's a summary, not a copy of the novel with a lot of the words taken out. Some chapters might only provide enough of the narrative to make a couple of sentences whilst others will produce paragraphs, if the summary is getting to the point it requires subdivision then its still too long. -- 8of5 19:30, 3 May 2007 (UTC) ::The chapters are fairly distinct; the chapter subtitles I used came directly from the book. I would agree that the summary is too long, although if that is your opinion as well I'm not sure why this got the FA nomination (no offense). I definitely believe that the summary either needs to be clipped, or subdivided... without either, the summary takes up a full four "pages" of unbroken text on my computer. -- Data Noh 20:33, 3 May 2007 (UTC) :::I was perfectly happy with the summary, I agree it's long but not too long, there's alot in the novel, but, if you think it requires subdivision then that says to me you think it's too long. --8of5 21:11, 3 May 2007 (UTC) :::Well actually I say that... I personally would have written it much shorter, but I'm not going to reread a novel just so I can write a slightly shorter summary, I think the summary is justifiabley long, but could be shorter. *hopes he dosn't sound like a mad man* --8of5 21:17, 3 May 2007 (UTC) ::::Mad man :o) -- Data Noh 01:18, 4 May 2007 (UTC) ::Imagine my surprise when chapter subdivisions were added into the summary. The summary was originally written with the breaks in, but both 8of5 and User:The doctor argued that they preferred their summaries "long and flowing". Nobody argued for chapter breaks that I can remember. The reason that they are "out of order" is precisely to avoid breaking the flow of the summary reading. I have placed the related events together such as putting both chapters featuring the Embassy invasion together, putting the inspection chapters together, etc. The exception is when events from one part of the narrative have to come before those of the other part. It is the introduction of new chapters themselves (changes in location) that interrupts the narrative flow. Placing chapter headings is especially awkward when these are presented out of order leaving the not-too-careful reader of this page just wondering why they are "out of order". Chapter breaks only make sense to me if the chapters are placed in order. If you want to break up the summary, why not just put "Qo'noS", "On the Enterprise", etc.? The chapter numbers look funny. ::As for the length, it would probably be good to cut it a bit more again, but to cut it again by more than 30% or so would leave it looking more like a list of what happened (or missing important things that happened) rather than a narrative itself. This seems fine with me, but we have to ask what the point of the summary is. If it is something that you can actually read itself to get the gist of most important things that happened without having read the novel, I don't see why this length is that bad. If the ideal length is only 3-4 paragraphs to remind the person who has already read the work which book this is as opposed to another book, that is another thing entirely. Personally, I like the idea that if a character is listed as having appeared, there is at least a decent chance of them appearing in the summary to see what happened in that novel to them. --Jdvelasc 04:21, 4 May 2007 (UTC) :::As far as the section headers go, feel free to change them to something more appropriate. Four pages of text needs some sort of division; otherwise, it is very uninteresting. As for your desired level of detail, it is best to include it in the page for the actual character. That's why we have the "references" list, so people can link to information they are interested in. If it is really important to include specifics in this page, it should probably be saved for the "Character arc development." I'm not sure why that section is even included at present, since all the information in it can be found in the summary. -- Data Noh 15:43, 4 May 2007 (UTC) Removed Reference Whew! I think I finally got ALL the references. The only one I removed that has been there for a while was to a Clara Preston; I couldn't find this name through three passes of the book. A Google search also turns her name up on the Extended Universe wiki... so I figured it to be a long standing mistake and removed it. --Captain Savar 00:30, 11 November 2008 (UTC)